4 days on gemma 4 26b quantized, honest notes

Running it on a mac mini m4 24gb via ollama legitimately good for: structured tasks, code generation, json formatting, following specific instructions. the apache 2.0 license means you can actually ship commercial products on it where it falls apart: multi-step reasoning and self correction. tried it with hermes agent for agentic workflows and it loses the thread after 3-4 steps. ends up in loops or contradicts its own earlier output sweet spot for me is routing simple repeatable tasks to gemma locally and anything needing real judgement to cloud apis.